Geysers

Thursday was a geothermal sort of day - we started off by heading to the Norris Geyser Basin. Before we even got there we pulled in to the side of the road (on seeing other cars pulled in, as often happens when something exciting is happening) and saw a grizzly bear and a wolf squabbling over some sort of carcass at the edge of the woods. This was pretty amazing.

Just as we arrived at Norris a friendly Park Ranger called Emma asked us if we would like to join in her guided walk which was about to start. We said Yes Please and she took us and the rest of the group on a very informative walk around the Back Basin for about a mile and a half. It was great to listen to her chatting away because it meant that we didn't need to consult our guide book, and she also told us anecdotes about events that happened here. For example, the early tourists in the 1870s that were captured by a group of Nez Perce Native Americans who were fleeing from the American army. We saw lots of hot springs and geysers including the great wee Vixen Geyser which slowly fills up with water and then shoots into the air every fifteen minutes. They are all different in size, timing, colour - brilliant! After our tour we walked around the Porcelain Basin area which has a brand new board walk that just reopened today, there were so many geysers to look at.

We had a leisurely picnic lunch beside the Firehole River. When I put my feet into the river while reading my book I found that it was remarkably warm. When we continued on to the Grand Prismatic Spring we found out why - the river is fed by several large hot springs.

I have never seen anything like the Grand Prismatic Spring. Rather than visit it by the official boardwalk route, we followed a tip in the guidebook by parking further up the road and walking the first part of the fairy pools trail. Then, ignoring warning signs, we climbed up a small but steep and dusty hill to view it from above. I'm so glad that we did, we could see all of its bright colours; blue in the centre of the spring which became turquoise and green at the edges, then the ground around it was ringed with yellow and orange where the acidic mineral waters spill over to stain the ground. With the steam rising above it the spring is a very beautiful sight. 

Our next port of call was Old Faithful - well we couldn't miss that out could we? It isn't the biggest or most frequent geyser in Yellowstone but it is very regular (about every ninety minutes) and very, very famous. We noticed that crowds were gathering so we got ourselves ice creams and sat down to wait for about 15 minutes (information boards in the surrounding buildings predict the time of the next eruption). Sure enough the cry went up of "There she goes!"and jets of steam and boiling water shot up hundreds of feet into the air for about five minutes. Very impressive.

The day was rounded off by dinner at the Old Faithful Inn, which is very old-fashioned and built entirely of wood - it's a tourist attraction in its own right and rather crowded. Luckily I had booked dinner from home about a month ago - or so I thought. In fact they couldn't find my booking on the system at all but they found a table for us anyway. Afterwards we had coffee outside on the first floor terrace of the hotel where we could observe Old Faithful erupting for us again.